re: Heidegger Kitsch

By now most people are familiar with the concept of Heidegger Kitsch: the aping of Heidegger’s verbal mannerisms without the soul of the thing being there. At times Heidegger himself even seems to lapse into this, such as in portions of the Beiträge and even more in lesser texts in the same vein such as Besinnung.

This is probably the fate of any important philosophy. In order to recapture the soul of the thing, a new philosophy needs to be created from scratch that borrows from some of the more recent important ones. This is why I never sympathize with people who chuckle about “the next new thing.” I don’t see what harm is done by next new things. They are candidates for long-term durability, and nothing more. You have to consider a number of candidates if you want to get a few live ones, and there are generally only a handful of live ones per century.

We’ve been familiar with Derrida Kitsch for 20 years; in fact, in Derrida’s case some of it was simultaneous with the high point of the movement, perhaps because he is so verbally mannered that imitation is naturally encouraged.

In the past several years we’ve begun to see Deleuze Kitsch. By this I mean certain decisions of Deleuze that are automatically followed even though their liberating power is already somewhat expended. For example, the tendency to prefer Deleuze’s own line of “minor” thinkers: the Stoics, Spinoza, Hume, Bergson, etc. Whenever this sort of thing goes too far, it’s better to shift emphasis to the other side, whose defects are inevitably being exaggerated. It’s one of the reasons I think a time is ripe for a return not to “minor” but to the “major” thinkers with whom Deleuze doesn’t do enough: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz (Le Pli has almost nothing to do with Leibniz; it’s really just another Deluzian book about Spinoza; you can’t take Leibniz seriously if you don’t take individual substances seriously, and Deleuze never did).

As for Badiou Kitsch, we’re not there yet. Everyone is still busy trying to master him. But I can feel it coming. It won’t appear in mass quantities for another 7-10 years, I don’t think, but will be fairly miserable and oppressive once it does. It is likely to have a reign of terror of some 2-3 years, in fact, simply because Badiou’s tone is already somewhat aggressive, and in Kitsch version this will be exaggerated as usual.